


Escaping Arcadia

by DrownSoda



Category: Brideshead Revisited - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 14:37:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13706502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrownSoda/pseuds/DrownSoda
Summary: Charles does not want to see the glimmering, breathless, rose-tinted Oxford days, as he stands in his uniform just yards away from the house that made him the man he is. He wants to see the truth of it all.





	Escaping Arcadia

**Author's Note:**

> Some parts of this are taken directly from the novel, and as Evelyn Waugh is an infinitely greater writer than I am (and also I assume everyone reading this is thoroughly familiar with the novel) it should be obvious which parts.

 

_It was not till I reached the door that I asked the_  
_second-in-command, "What's this place called?"_

_He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched_  
_off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly,_  
_fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense_  
_silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense_  
_regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and_  
_long-forgotten sounds -- for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to_  
_me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the_  
_phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight._

_***_

Of course, none of these men would ever know how the sight of that building, the mere utterance of its name, could have any effect stronger than a pleasing of my aesthetic senses, or the recalling of a few memories, bitter or beloved.

None of them could know how the sight of it, the sound of it, could cause such a relentless feeling of doom, like choking on the smoke at a party that you desperately want to leave but cannot, and having to laugh at the joyless jokes and thank the host when you want nothing more than to smash the glass and brandish the shards, screaming “Get away! Let me be!”

Even if they, by some godly intuition, could sense this feeling and eke it out of me until I was a sweating, sobbing pile on the grass, I was confident that not one of them, not a single soul except my own, would ever know what lay beneath. All the smoke and the screams were a subterfuge of my mind, an attempt to conceal the infinitely more painful memories that lurked there.  
  
No, not lurked - these memories didn’t mean to threaten me. They had a right to be there, in their golden brilliance, and couldn’t understand why someone in a world of grey would want to hide their vivid colours. They weren’t malicious, no, they simply desired to make me see them again, make me remember.

Not memories of Julia. They stood at the forefront and throbbed in their rawness, too recent to join the ranks of the rest and too distant to kill. They’d had their resolution and merely wanted to wring the last dregs of bitterness they had in themselves. I could push them aside with relative ease because I knew, if I chose to, I could set them free, let them flow out of my mouth and be understood.

Yes, they would be understood. _Man loves a woman. Man cannot have the woman. Man weeps, and shouts and, after a thoroughly good pat on the back and a sufficient amount of liquor, man pulls himself together._ A tale as old as time itself, I’m sure.

What I will never be sure about is Sebastian. A love as old as time itself, but not a tale because it cannot be told. I was fairly certain that if it were ever spoken to the likes of these it would be met with undue vileness. Imagine, turning to _these_ men, who, whether they were corn-fed or had been breathing smog since the womb, would all be equally clueless and disgusted.

It is easy when you have suppressed such pain to grow poisonous and cultivate this sense of self-superiority. _I know more than these men will ever know because I have felt hurting I am sure they have never felt._

The memories that cannot be breathed, haunt. Like the faint scent of perfume on a dead woman’s wedding dress, we make them overpowering because we want to feel them again. All those snapshots of Sebastian I had were clouded in cliche.

_His skin golden, smooth and soft. His lips like honey. His eyes shimmering in the dim morning light, as I lay on top of him, not obscenely, not yet. His chest, rising and falling._

I thought of Anthony and what he would think of my trite thoughts.

_“Nothing is o-o-obscene about that, my dear Charles, except for the r-r-repugnant predictability of it. No originality, what a sh-shame.”_

I thought of my days as a Painter, capitalised, a romantic, lowercase. In those days my tongue dripped with a pretension my father would have considered unbecoming for the middle classes. I would spend hours rambling to Sebastian - rather, “at” Sebastian - about my theories on art and life.

 _“An artist has a duty to find both beauty and truth, right, Sebastian? Beauty in truth, truth in beauty. To lie on the canvas is a grave mistake, as anyone with a discerning eye can see right through it. Right, Sebastian?”_ He nodded, mumbled, never offered his own opinion on the matter. I doubt he had one.

Stood there, in front of one of the finest examples of architecture one could conjure up, I knew I was not truly an artist, not even by my own elementary standards. I could not find beauty in the truth. I did what anyone else did, embellished reality to make the picture prettier in my mind, on the canvas.

No man tastes like honey, has hair soft as silk, not even him. His breath tasted of liquor, his hair dried from sea-salt. I had never laid on top of Sebastian with thoughts of anything except how I could get inside of him. We were nineteen year old boys, for God’s sake. When one considers themself an artist, they become a Catholic - they want the best moments to be preserved as a glittering tableau of lustless ecstasy, one that others will gaze at and catch their breath, stunned. But I had loved him the way anyone of my disposition loves a man, crudely and carnally. That is the truth, and there is nothing beautiful about it.

_“Now th-that is quite the observation, Ryder,” the voice purred again, “b-b-but is there not beauty in the shocking, in the crude?”_

I looked around again, at these uniform-clad, wind-beaten, red-faced men that stood like blights on the perfect landscape, and decided that no, there wasn’t. Beauty is a divine thing.

Sebastian really was beautiful. I resented the fact that it was the first thing I had thought upon seeing him, and the key feature of my memory of him. Julia was beautiful too, of course - she was also funny, dry, mysterious, imperfect. Sebastian had been deified by my mind, made into an object of reverence.

Maybe it was easier on the soul to remember him in two dimensions. Both the artist and the Catholic love the martyr, who is most beautiful of all because he is not entirely human.

No, no, I thought, as I barked mindlessly at my inferiors. He deserves more than that. I endeavoured to push through the fog of the mind, rip the veil of beauty that prevented me from accessing the joy of my memories away. To love someone, I’m sure a wise man or woman once said, is to love them wholly. To paint a picture of sweet youth and romantic friendship was to paint a self portrait based off the remarks of a flatterer.

I knew the moment the truth seeped in that it would hurt more than anything I had ever experienced before. It would be like running into Brideshead itself and ravaging it, shattering every painstakingly crafted window and torching every portrait that preserved an ancestor at their prime. I would see something possible, and know that despite its possibility I would never achieve it. But it was necessary. I would not die half a man.

I loved Sebastian, I repeated mentally as I caught my breathing accelerating, a man approaching hysteria. I loved him, I loved him. Julia, unfailingly astute as she was, knew I loved him, she did. Perhaps she did not know exactly how I loved him, but she did know exactly how much. I loved him unrepentantly, uncompromisingly, completely. To exalt this love, raise it to a Platonic ideal or a Romantic ideal, was to kill it.

The image of him, naked and tousled on his bed, svelte as only a nineteen year old could be, made me burn then, and it still does now. It is not pure, and it is not beautiful, but I can feel it. God, I can feel it.

And the image of him laughing, and crying, and drinking, and arguing, and fucking, all imperfect and unpoetic but real memories, not an untouchable ideal, all the more painful to recount for it. Not sacred, not sinful, but simple and searing.

My feet moved onwards, closer to the building, their patter on the grass an elegy to all of my loves.

Sebastian was sweet, and warm-hearted, and charitable. That was the greatest difference between me and him - he, for all of his faults, loved with the love of God. He could find something to love in almost everyone he met, just as all he met loved him. I was cursed to love with the love of man, singularly, obsessively - even when I loved Julia I was loving him, him above all else. The sight of him was not a grand occasion, but an everyday joy, taken for granted because the idea of it no longer existing was beyond comprehension. It seemed idiotic to me, then, to suggest that I had survived years without Sebastian and would surely survive more if he were to leave.

The temptation to make my love into a tragedy, Charles and Sebastian stained on church glass, him weeping tears of gold into his wine glass as I weep at his feet, is ever strong. But it is not true. He left and I lived.

Sebastian encouraged the singularity of my love. He was human, selfish. He loathed for me to meet anyone I may have loved more than him, and yet could not understand how I doubted his love when he seemed to love so many others.

_“It is a different kind of love, Charles.”_

He was more of a saint than anyone I had ever met, or, I believe, will ever meet. A saint who drowned himself in alcohol, was a sodomite, lived in sin, blasphemed, cursed by the tainted blood of his father or by the cruel hand of his mother - his was an ugly, goodly existence. His entire life he spent surrounded by unimaginable beauty, his very soul contained inside a painfully beautiful body - it made no difference. It meant nothing to him. He could find it anywhere. He did not understand why I could not. He was all there was for me.

I could not explain this to the men, these men that stood beside me. I could not explain this to Anthony, to Celia, to Julia, to anyone because I knew the moment I tried to confess the words would stick to my tongue and the godforsaken honey would spill out. Even my gravest confession would be censored, forcibly prettified by the lingering ghost in my brain that told me my love for Sebastian could only be acceptable so long as it was beautiful, Platonic, artistic, God-like.

_**_

_“There's a frightful great fountain, too, in front of the steps, all rocks and sort of carved animals. You never saw such a thing."_

_"Yes, Hooper, I did. I've been here before."_

Hooper paused momentarily, chewing his lip, “It’s quite beautiful, you know, if you like that sort of thing.”

I stared at the man, who was shifting on his feet, my eyes clearly discomforting him. I opened my mouth slowly, almost scared I would break into delirious, crazed confession against my own will. But I did not. No one ever does anything against their own will, really.

”Yes, it is. I do like this sort of thing, I suppose.”

What else could I tell him? Not the truth, certainly.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to talk to me or see more examples of my fake deep ramblings my tumblr is ohdirtyriver :)


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